Granny D’s American Century

5 | At Sea

At Sea June 1929. The Nantucket, a steamer named for its daily destination , carried on the darkened lower deck two dozen grand, gleaming automobiles, creaking back and forth like yachts at evening mooring. Topside, there were long sunny benches of veteran ferry riders— old friends—already in their yellow summer hats and colorful loose cottons. They were all chatting and snacking like in Renoir’s Boat Party—and then a few seasick people like me. The trip took several hours, and the seas between Hyannis and Nantucket were rough. Despite my stomach, I was feeling the joy of adventure. I had left the mainland, after all. Far out there somewhere was Ireland, England, France, Spain with its castles—how remarkable ! What a planet for adventure! South America was down that way. Africa, roughly there, as I stared across the horizon. The world was wide open to me, fresh and blue and only slightly too bounding. It was a new iron boat that had very recently replaced the last of the wooden ships serving the Cape and the islands. I was told this and much more by an old man of straw skimmer and jaunty gray moustache and fine blue blazer with brass buttons. He joined me at the rail for some air—no doubt one of the finer automobiles below was his. The Cape itself, and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and many of the ups and downs of New England, he informed me, were created by the gouging action of incoming glaciers and also by the rocks they had picked up during this gouging and had carried along until they dropped into huge piles and islands as the glaciers melted and died. If I’m not mistaken, he was teary-eyed at the thought of it. He composed himself. “The Laurentide Ice Sheet, to call it by name, Miss, is responsible for most of what you see when you look upon New England and the Cape and the islands. The rocks left behind are called terminal moraines.” His red, weathered face—a sailor’s, or rather a yachtsman’s face— squinted into a thousand wrinkles as he disclosed these secrets. As I 5 32 granny d’s american century looked at the distant islands on this, my first passage, he swept a hand out to describe the great ice that had come down to do battle. “Mr. Muir, of the West, writes about how avalanches out there are what he calls part of the beauty-making. Well, Miss, I will put our glaciers up against the West’s meager avalanches any day, wouldn’t you? Why, the Laurentide had whole mountains for breakfast, and now there is all this beauty to show for it, and not so long ago!” he added. He could see, glancing downward, that I seemed to have an intelligent body, and so he added a generous bonus of information regarding the fact that the tilt of the earth actually changes over time, helping to cause ice ages when there is not enough warmth at the poles. He went on and on for the rest of the journey, surely saving me from throwing up, as I didn’t want to be unladylike in front of him, and so I concentrated mightily and breathed deeply the salt air. I did not take notes on his geology lecture, by the way, but can reconstruct it because I was soon to meet an amateur geologist who would recount the same story many times. I went below to seek the ladies’ room. I found myself down one level too deep, in the dark of the automobiles. I should have gone right back up the same stairs, but thought I would cut across through the fancy cars and come up on the starboard side. Halfway through the murky maze, I thought I heard a groan in the dark. There was some movement between the cars, like someone stooped down. I rounded the high rear of a luxury limousine and found myself inches from a pale man in a dark coat, perhaps a driver or some kind of guard. Maybe he had dropped something or was checking a tire and was just now standing. He smiled in a rather sick way at my startle. For a second we lurched together with the squeaking cars on the rough sea. I had just seen the silent film Nosferatu, a German import, before leaving Boston. It was my first vampire film. This man in the...